Beautiful Decay No. 5

Plus I’m melancholy from some future work travel and the comfortable press of way way too much to do, most of it partially done..

It’s in this mental space that I discovered Handiedan, a dutch artist referred by my favorite local gallery, Roq La Rue, who will be showing her most of the month of July.

This is the picture that has done the most brain-smiting for me so far..

I love her use of visual ornamentation as emotional grammar and her eye for composition vs. incompleteness — and in this piece I’m especially drawn to the language of confidence (money!) and desire (pin-ups). This makes music with my subconscious processing of the Graeber.

I have decided that she is the cover artist for a novel I have been imagining for 20+ years, the one about time-travelling robotic nuns and the Varangian Guard, set in Los Angeles and a silver-grassed version of the moon.